The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

Thursday, September 30, 2004

"Eighteen years ago, the world's worst nuclear accident occurred. Newspaper reports at the time reflected the near-universal public hysteria: The Daily Mail filled half its front page with the words '2000 DEAD;' the New York Post claimed that 15,000 bodies had been bulldozed into nuclear waste pits. But the overreaction to the accident caused far more harm than the meltdown itself, as it mistakenly led to the halting of nuclear programs in most Western countries, including the United States.....

The graphite burned for nine days, releasing a total of about 12 x 1018 becquerels of radioactivity - about 30 to 40 times that of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It just could not be any worse: Corners had been cut from the very inception of the reactor's design, right through construction, operation, and maintenance. Training and safety procedures were negligible. The Supreme Soviet that routinely disregarded human life was as negligent in nuclear-reactor policy as it was in everything else. Even The Simpsons's woeful nuclear power-plant owner, Mr. Burns, would have been ashamed of it.

The complete destruction of the reactor killed 31 people, including 28 from radiation exposure, most of whom were firefighters working on the roof. A further 209 people on site were treated for acute radiation poisoning and 134 cases were confirmed (all of whom recovered). Since then, an increase in childhood thyroid cancer has been reported, although it is not certain that this is not due to increased surveillance. There has been no other increase in radiation-induced disease, congenital abnormalities, or adverse pregnancy outcomes.....

No, the biggest tragedy of Chernobyl was that radioactivity was governed by preposterous safety regulations that forced the authorities to take extreme and damaging action against the very people they were trying to protect. Until very recently, radiological protection (and chemical regulations) depended on the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory. This says that, because high levels of exposure can cause death, there is no safe lower limit. If this sounds like a reasonable level of precaution, consider this: 750 F will cause fatal burns, while 75 F is a lovely summer's day. Vitamin A is an essential trace chemical in our diet but is toxic at high levels. The dose makes the poison, for chemicals and for radiation.

On the basis of this false assumption, nearly 400,000 people were forcibly evacuated from areas around Chernobyl where radiation was actually lower than the normal background levels in Cornwall and five times lower than at Grand Central Station in New York. To these poor unfortunates, there was damage done...... Perhaps saddest of all is that as many as 200,000 "wanted" pregnancies ended in abortion, in order to avoid non-existent radiation damage to the fetuses.....

Apportioning blame between the media and the Supreme Soviet is a difficult task. But unfounded Western fears based on the LNT hypothesis undoubtedly encouraged the Soviet mass evacuation program. Yet that inaccurate LNT hypothesis still forms the basis of radiation thinking - and it's past time that was changed. Nuclear power has dangers, which are less in terms of actual deaths per unit energy produced than most other forms of energy generation. But as long as this exaggerated image of Chernobyl endures, people will continue to imagine the costs of nuclear energy to be far higher than they really are".

MORE JUNK SCIENCE: SPRAWL IS BAD FOR YOU

So, commuters get less exercise. Tell us something else new

"Warning: suburban sprawl may be hazardous to your health. A report scheduled to be released today found that people who live in areas with a high degree of sprawl are more likely to report chronic health problems such as high blood pressure, arthritis, headaches and breathing difficulties, compared to residents in less sprawled-out areas.

The differences remained even when researchers accounted for factors such as age, economic status and race. "People who live in more sprawling areas are more likely to have chronic health problems over time," said Roland Sturm, co-author of the report by Rand Corp., a nonprofit research group. "People drive more in these areas; they walk less." Researchers said the findings suggest that an adult who lives in a sprawling city such as Atlanta will have health characteristics similar to someone four years older, but otherwise similar, who lives in a more compact city like Seattle.

A sprawling area is defined in the study as a place that has streets not well connected, lower population density and areas that are far from each other, such as schools and shopping malls. The report is not the first to suggest that sprawl cramps a healthy lifestyle. Last year, major studies found that residents of such areas - where driving to work or school is routine and walking and bike riding difficult or dangerous - weighed more than their counterparts in walkable cities like New York".

The policies of bthe Australian Green Party reveal how extensive Greenie nuttiness is:

"The Greens' energy policies are simply wrong-headed. At a time when many countries are looking at expanding the use of coal - for which Australia is a major supplier - as a clean fuel source using new technology, the Greens' policy is to "establish an ecologically sustainable post-carbon economy in Australia by phasing out the use of coal by 2050".

Obsessed with the idea that greenhouse gas-induced climate change must be stopped by punitive controls over energy usage, it is also opposed to the one energy source which clearly makes no contribution to greenhouse gases: nuclear power.

It calls for an "immediate end to uranium mining and the export of uranium from Australia", although Australian governments require the strictest standards of export anywhere in the world, and supply much of the uranium used in countries such as Japan, Western Europe and the UK.

Its fixation with nuclear energy extends to a call for the closure of the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney, no replacement, and a ban on the transport of nuclear material, meaning that thousands of Australians who depend on nuclear medicines used in anti-cancer therapies would be denied medical treatment.....

It proposes bans on the use of drugs on farm animals, except where they are prescribed by veterinarians. In other words, routine preventive treatment to deal with internal and external parasites, and vaccination programs used on every farm, would be banned.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

GREENIE ATTACKS ON THE WORLD BANK

Greenies like keeping poor nations poor

"As I've discovered time and again, feisty Internet-enabled activists wage endless campaigns against the world's premier development institution, forcing it to spend an absurd amount of effort on public relations and delaying good projects that could reduce poverty.

I ran into one instance of the damage caused by such campaigns in Uganda, where the World Bank had been backing a dam to generate badly needed electricity. The project had drawn fire from Western environmental groups, notably the International Rivers Network of Berkeley. The activists argued, among other things, that the dam ignored popular opposition from the Ugandan environmental movement and that it would harm the poor farmers whose land would be flooded.

But when I checked these allegations, I found the evidence was weak. The Ugandan environmental "movement" consisted of a grouplet with only 25 members. And when I teamed up with a local sociologist to interview people around the dam site, I found that they were happy with the money they would get to compensate them for moving.

Or take an example from China. In 1999, the World Bank agreed to back a project that would move 58,000 extremely poor Chinese farmers off barren land into an area where they could grow enough to feed their families. Because the project was in a province that bordered on Tibet, Tibet activists in the West sprang into action: They claimed that the World Bank was backing Han Chinese colonization of Tibetan lands, even though no Han farmers were being imported from outside the province, and even though some of the resettled farmers were themselves Tibetan. Hollywood figures such as Richard Gere joined in the campaign, and Reps. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) beat up on the bank too. After a long, costly fight, the bank pulled out of the project.

Or take the case of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, another controversial World Bank enterprise. Western activists opposed this, partly on the reasonable ground that oil projects seldom help the poor, but also because the pipeline would supposedly disrupt the rain forest through which it traveled. At the World Bank's insistence, the pipeline consortium prepared a social and environmental impact study that ran to 19 volumes, but the activists still predicted catastrophe if construction went ahead. In this instance, the protesters were defeated and the pipeline was built - without any terrible environmental fallout. But the delays cost millions of dollars, and the bill was ultimately paid by the world's poorest people.....

The World Bank has done its utmost to fight back. Its president, James Wolfensohn, is a formidable charmer with an infectious, poverty-fighting passion; if he can't win over the bank's foes, no leader could. Which means that film stars, members of Congress and (yes) journalists must do their bit to help him out. The World Bank will remain hobbled and encircled until the rest of us begin to treat activist assertions with a dose of skepticism. Some seeming good-guy groups are less noble than they claim to be."

"We have limited resources and face many challenges. Here's a simple truth; the money spent to combat climate change is not available to eradicate malaria, killer of 2 million people each year, 90 percent are children under 5. And it takes money to increase female literacy in poor nations -- perhaps the key investment for social progress.

Those who believe climate change trumps all else ignore the reality that we must trade off among competing values. Those who deny this hold a religious position that is not open to reason.

What if those who question the need for dramatic action are all pawns of "corporate polluters"? Even if so (it's not), the costs of addressing climate change will be paid by real people. Does anyone honestly believe Pacific Gas and Electric deliberately emits carbon to destroy our climate? Aren't they simply responding to consumers willingness to give up something they value (i.e., money) for the energy required to run their washing machines and PCs?....

The great grandchildren of the world's poorest are those most likely to be adversely effected by global warming. Here's the key to ethical policies. The best defense against adverse consequences of warming is wealth creation in the developing world. Here's why. In this arena as in so many others, wealth buffers adversity. The greatest dangers are premature policies which stifle third world economic progress, e.g., first world trade barriers. This great truth is often ignored in the debate over climate change.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Global jockeying over global warming: "British Prime Minister Tony Blair's call for America to ratify the Kyoto Protocol this week tacitly acknowledges that Russian ratification, thought by then-Commissioner Wallstrom to have been secured by EU concessions on Russian World Trade Organization membership earlier this year, is no longer a serious prospect. Instead, European eyes are turning once again to the United States."

THE WICKED PROF. BELLAMY

He shows what an honest Greenie looks like. The true belivers in global warming think that majority votes rather than the evidence decide whether or not global warming is man-made or natural. Prof. Bellamy goes by the evidence. A majority vote in Galileo's day would have "proved" that the earth is flat. Excerpt:

"Renowned British environmentalist David Bellamy will visit Australia this week to support anti-wind farm groups and expound his controversial views on global warming. In a trip funded by the television show "60 Minutes", Professor Bellamy will be the main speaker at an anti-wind farm meeting in Foster, South Gippsland, on Wednesday night.

But the visit has dismayed Australian conservationists because the high-profile botanist has aligned himself with a small, discredited group of scientists who dismiss the problem of climate change. Despite the now solid evidence that humans - by burning fossil fuels - largely caused global temperatures to rise 0.6 degrees last century, Professor Bellamy believes the warming is natural and that high levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide are good and will make plants grow better......

Professor Bellamy, admired in Australia for demonstrating against the Franklin River dam, told The Age from his home in Britain that he hoped the 60 Minutes program would stop the spread of wind farms - just as his two other 60 Minutes pieces had helped stop the dam and put more water back down the Snowy River.

In July Professor Bellamy infuriated his fellow environmentalists by writing an article called "Global Warming? What a load of poppycock!" in London's Daily Mail. "Hooray for global warming is what I say, and so do a lot of my fellow scientists," he wrote.

Nevertheless, Professor Bellamy's visit will bolster the anti-wind farm sentiment in South Gippsland, where the recently approved and controversial Bald Hills wind farm is an election issue in the marginal seat of McMillan. He told "The Age" that wind farms ruined coasts, required back-up from fossil fuels, intermittently produced small amounts of energy and "chop up birds and spook the bats and the poor little things die"...

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Monday, September 27, 2004

GLOBAL WARMING SECT VERSUS ANTI-NUKE SECT:

At least he realizes that nuclear power is the only viable alternative to conventional sources

China isn't afraid of nuclear power and is building a new generation of safer more reliable reactors: "Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies, and the media... Even if they were right about its dangers - and they are not - its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear, the one safe, available energy source, now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."

DRAT! TREES NOT VANISHING

"Remember the nineties? The radical environmental movement screaming that the world as we knew it was destined to doom because of the nasty chip mills, the clear cut destruction of the forests, the pollution of our waters caused by cutting trees, and all of the other "chicken little" mantras? Near the end of that decade, a study was begun in order to find out just how badly the southern forests really were damaged. Not an industry study, "tainted" by profit motive, but a honest-to-goodness government study, pure in heart, uninfluenced by anything but a search for truth......

The USDA Forest Service took the lead in this study and enlisted help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. For over two years, more than 25 scientists and analysts worked on this study. More than 100 scientists from universities, state and federal agencies, industry and conservation organizations provided peer reviews to enhance the accuracy and completeness of this report. Finally, in late 2001, the report was made public and was received with huge waves of apathy.

Why? The report was of no use to the radical environmental community because, with painstaking research and documented facts, it destroyed every assertion they had made concerning the forests of the south. It gave the lie to their "chicken little" scenarios and was impregnable to their attack because of the unimpeachable integrity of those who had created the study. So the radical environmental community just acted as if it had never happened.....

The Southern Forest Resource Assessment documents one of the greatest natural resource management triumphs in the history of man. From the stump landscapes of the early 1900's, the southern forests have recovered to become one of the wood baskets of the world. Vibrant, never static, quickly responding to changing conditions, the southern forests meet the needs of today and are poised to embrace tomorrow.

The Resource Assessment does not cover the why of this marvelous transformation, but I will tell you why. It is because the southern forests are privately owned. The essential difference between the southern forests and the burning, stagnant forests of the west and looted forests of foreign lands is that of private ownership. Each landowner managing his own lands (and doing it very well as the Assessment shows) for his own perceived self-interest."

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Sunday, September 26, 2004

A realistic Greenie gets abused: "I'm sure it wasn't Eddie Bauer's intention to be the poster child for searing liberal hypocrisy, but there it is, all laid out in living color in The New Yorker, Wired, Vogue and the rest of the flagship magazines owned by Conde Nast. In a six-page, full color insert, adorned with celebrities like Daryl Hannah and Rob Lowe pictured outdoors wearing company clothing, Bauer trumpets the arrival of 'Fashion Planet,' declaring 'Here's a fashion tip -- think green.' Along with each celebrity?s photo and the environmental message they espouse comes a breakdown of the cost of the clothes they are wearing. Hey, America, you can look stylish AND save the earth if you 'reduce, reuse, recycle ... and shop.' What the reader doesn't see is the true cost of those clothes. If you walk into a Eddie Bauer store, which I did a few days ago, you learn pretty quickly that it's the same old story: clothes made by sweatshop labor." [The union advocate who wrote this article deliberately ignores the fact that overseas workers take low-paid manufacturing jobs because the alternatives available to them pay even less. They badly need the work. So our union advocate is the disgusting one. He wants to force desperately poor people out of work in the hope of helping a few more American waistlines to bulge]

ANTARCTIC ALARMISM -- IT SELLS PAPERS

But the truth is there if you look hard. See the bits I have highlighted in red

"Spurred by warming coastal air and waters, some of Antarctica's glaciers have accelerated their seaward march, fresh observations show, suggesting that ocean levels might be irreversibly on the rise for centuries to come.

Global warming from smokestack and tailpipe emissions of heat-trapping gases could well be contributing to the changes, but some of what is happening is probably a delayed reaction to the long warm-up since the last ice age, glaciologists said yesterday.

Over all, Antarctica still holds a mix of conditions, with some spots cooling and others warming, but the new observations, described this week in three scientific papers, confirm that warming along the coast, as it causes fringes of ice to melt, can release larger ice sheets to flow faster to the ocean, where they will inevitably melt.

[Blah, Blah, Blah]

That change already constitutes a slow-motion catastrophe for places like Bangladesh, New Orleans and low island nations, experts say [but some very expert experts deny it]. But the findings add weight to the idea that rising seas could be a fact of life for centuries to come, requiring serious reassessments of the human penchant for living along coasts.

In a paper published today in the online edition of the journal Science, one team said the vast glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea were thinning twice as fast near the coast as they had in the 1990's. This is important because these glaciers help drain the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a region containing enough ice to raise sea levels 20 feet.

The changes in these glaciers could be a delayed response to the departure of coastal ice shelves there in the prolonged warming since the last ice age, experts not associated with the study said. But the speed-up could also have been affected by recent further warming of the air and seas in the western Antarctic, some of which is probably linked to warming of the global climate from gas emissions, independent experts and study authors said.

[Etc., etc. And, of course, more careful researchers have found more or less the opposite. See my post of August 5th.]

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Senate mounts sneak attack on sound science: "In a behind-the-scenes move with far reaching implications, the Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved a bill including language that would shield one of the federal government?s most important scientific agencies from legal requirements mandating integrity in government science. A clause in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Commerce and other agencies (S. 2809) would exempt research produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from complying with the Federal Data Quality Act, which requires that data circulated by federal agencies conform to standards of scientific integrity."

CALIFORNIA: HOW GREENIES HATE CARS!

"Once again, state regulators are out to get cars and trucks. In the old days, the attacks were tied to claims of reducing smog or soot levels. But as air pollution continues to decline - despite people driving larger cars over longer distances - regulators have had to find a new excuse to stay in business: climate change.

Specifically, the California Air Resources Board is targeting carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide; the latter is also known as laughing gas. But the proposed regulation is no laughing matter. On Thursday, the air board is set to mandate that new vehicles sold in California cut their greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2016.

First, let's get the climate change excuse out of the way. California cars aren't causing climate change - taking all of the state's cars off the road completely wouldn't make a dent in emissions. According to government data, California motorists produce less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the world's emissions of the gases theoretically linked to global warming - a share that's declining every day as countries like China and India continue to grow. On top of that, the proposed regulation only addresses four of the six major greenhouse gases, and only passenger vehicles, not commercial vehicles. So whether you believe that we face a risk of catastrophic climate change due to man-made gas emissions or not, it is obvious that this new plan will provide little or no climate protection to current or future generations.

What about the effect on consumer choice and health? While the air board propounds a hodgepodge of technologies it claims will reduce emissions (like low-leak air-conditioning systems), the only truly effective way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide from cars is to reduce the amount of fuel they collectively burn or to change to a fuel that puts out less greenhouse gas per unit of energy. And the only way to do that is through mandating technology that would lighten and shrink cars, or by forcing "alternative fuel" vehicles onto a market that has shown little desire for them. Despite the hype, sales of hybrids across the country are expected to total around 88,000 cars this year. In comparison, there were 16.6 million new light vehicles sold in 2003.....

The danger of these mandates doesn't lie simply in their predictable failure. These laws expose people to higher risks in traffic accidents by forcing them into smaller, less protective vehicles, reduce consumer choice, suck resources out of the productive economy, and sink resources into bureaucratic paper-shuffling.

The new standards would also jeopardize the progress being made against smog and soot. When people trade older cars for newer cars (yes, even SUVs), they generally put out less smog and less soot than before. Raising the cost of newer cars slows down such purchases and the associated air pollution benefits....

Taking money out of people's pockets for higher fuel and automobile costs means less for the investments that can protect them from climate variability such as securing water resources, building resilient infrastructure and energy supplies, building a more diverse, robust and resilient economy, or investing in education or health care. And that's no laughing matter.
More here.

*****************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Friday, September 24, 2004

EVEN THE SCANDINAVIANS SAY CELLPHONES ARE SAFE

"There is no scientific evidence that mobile phone use or exposure to base stations below internationally accepted levels pose a health risk, radiation authorities in the Nordic countries said on Tuesday. "The balance of evidence to date suggests that exposures to radiofrequency radiation below the ICNIRP (International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection) guidelines do not cause adverse health effects to the general population," radiation authorities in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland said in a joint statement.

The statement came as a conclusion to a meeting between the five Nordic countries on the subject earlier this year. "There are a number of groups here in Sweden and in other countries that think we've been lying when we say there is no scientific proof of risks, so we thought it would be a good idea to show that all the Nordic countries have reached the same conclusion," Lars Mjoenes, a program coordinator with the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, said."

"A Man-Made rainforest that should have taken millennia to evolve has baffled scientists by springing up in just 150 years. Rainforests should take millions of years to develop the highly complex, interactive ecosystems for which they are famed, in which every species fills an essential niche.

But the forest on Green Mountain, Ascension Island, in the mid-Atlantic sprung up chaotically from a mixed bag of botanical scrap brought in by the Royal Navy in 1843. And the introduced species have thrived at a rate that has stunned experts and could trigger a rethink of conventional ecological theory, New Scientist magazine reports today.

When Charles Darwin stopped off at Ascension Island in 1836 on the home stretch of his long journey on the Beagle, he described it then as "entirely destitute of trees". Lying 1,200 miles from the nearest continent, the volcanic island was almost barren because of its remoteness, with only about 20 plant species, mainly ferns.

But in 1843, an ambitious British scheme for revitalising the island began, with Royal Navy troops planting thousands of trees a year, using seedlings from Argentina, South Africa, and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.....

Now Green Mountain is a thriving tropical forest, yet it grew from species collected randomly. Conventional theory suggests complex ecosystems only emerge through a slow evolution in which different organisms develop in tandem to fill particular niches. But Green Mountain suggests that natural rainforests may be constructed more by chance than by evolution.

Dissident theorists call this "ecological fitting". It says species do not so much evolve to create ecosystems as make the best of what they have. "The Green Mountain system is a spectacular example of ecological fitting," David Wilkinson, from Liverpool John Moores University, told New Scientist. "It is a man-made system that has produced a tropical rainforest without any co-evolution between its constituent species."

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Thursday, September 23, 2004

WICKED WEEDKILLER

The Center for Regulatory Effectiveness seems like a good outfit -- and not only because they have this blog on their front page at the moment! They are a non-governmental watchdog and seem to be instrumental in seeing that the U.S. Federal Data Quality Act is being enforced. And how the Greenies are squealing now that there has to be sound scientific evidence of harm before anything is banned! See here for a big Greenie rant about how unfair it all is.

Note how quickly the Greenies descend into character assassination and questioning of motives when they find that they cannot get America's second-leading weedkiller banned. That it has been widely used for many years with no obvious ill-effects just seems to make it a more obsessive target for them: A lot like the way the enviers are always trying to find fault with McDonalds.

CRE also have up a response showing the dishonesty of the Greenie rant in question. See here. Some short excerpts:

"Not withstanding press reports to the contrary, the Data Quality Act has its origins in the amendments to the Paperwork Reduction of 1995, at which time the Congress directed OMB to issue guidelines regarding the dissemination of information. OMB failed to comply with this directive and similar directives in 1998,1999 and 2000; culminating in Congressional action in 2000. Interestingly, Congress conducted extensive hearings in 1995, which often does not make it into press accounts which allege the Act was passed with no hearings or debate..... The assertion that Jim Tozzi rejected the proposed Reyes Syndrome labeling is completely inaccurate...."

SOME GOOD COMES OF THE GLOBAL WARMING SCARE

In trying to find something to do with the "excess" carbon dioxide that modern life is said to be producing, scientists have stumbled across a way of making a very powerful fertilizer which also happens to gobble up carbon dioxide. Excerpts:

"Researchers in the southeastern United States are experimenting with a procedure they believe could reduce greenhouse-gas pollution using a discovery pioneered thousands of years ago by farmers in the Brazilian Amazon. The technique, which uses a charcoal-based fertilizer to absorb gases, is one of several experiments under way as scientists concerned about global warming are looking for someplace -- any place -- to hide excess carbon dioxide.....

These facts have prompted researchers to look for new technologies to siphon off the amount of greenhouse gases that are produced by burning fossil fuels like petroleum products and coal.

Meanwhile, one entrepreneur is working with a team of government scientists who believe that the answer to the carbon question was discovered by South American natives centuries before Columbus set sail. Danny Day, the president of Eprida, a developer of clean technology, believes that greenhouse gases from burning coal and fossil fuels can be captured and injected into charcoal, which is then combined with ammonia to create a powerful fertilizer. Day said his company was developing a method for turning biomass materials into hydrogen, a process known as pyrolysis, when the new idea was born. Researchers working on the biomass experiment discovered that turnip plants were growing in a pile of charcoal produced during the pyrolysis process.

Later, Day stumbled upon research stating that charcoal had been used thousands of years ago by farmers in the Brazilian Amazon to create rich, dark soil known as Terra Preta de Indio. "We have to build a 'carbon reef'" to store the excess carbon, Day said. "And I realized that it had to be in the ground." Day, along with researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Georgia Institute of Technology, is developing technology based on the carbon-rich Terra Preta concept that uses charcoal to absorb greenhouse gases at facilities that burn fossil fuels. The charcoal is then mixed with other nutrients to create a super fertilizer, according to Day.

Day said that to create the charcoal that could be used as fertilizer, the biomass must be burned at temperatures somewhat lower than usual (say, 250 to 300 degrees Celsius). The charcoal fertilizer could be used to restore the nutrients in areas around the globe where soil has been depleted, according to Day. He believes charcoal-enhanced soil could increase crop yields by 200 percent to 300 percent.

Johannes Lehmann, assistant professor in the Department of Soil Fertility Management and Soil Biogeochemistry at Cornell University, however, said the carbon has been retained in the soil at the Terra Preta sites in South America for up to 3,000 years. Lehmann, who spent three years researching in the Amazon, said that possibly as long as 4,000 years ago, indigenous people discovered that partially burning wood materials at lower temperatures (250 to 350 degrees Celsius) to create charcoal and then combining it with nutrients such as fish bones or animal products made for a very effective fertilizer.

Researchers found that agricultural communities created nutrient-rich oases of fertile black soil in areas that were otherwise nearly barren of calcium and nitrogen. Tribes who treated their soil were able to stay in a single location for hundreds of years, according to Lehmann. "The charcoal is quite stable in retaining carbon in soil," said Lehmann, who is familiar with Eprida's research".

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Kerry's nuclear power problem: "Kerry's Web site states that 'nuclear power can play an essential role in providing affordable energy while reducing the risk of climate change.' His aides also say he is for nuclear power. So far, so good. But then on a recent campaign stop in Las Vegas -- about 100 miles away from the planned Yucca Mountain site for the long-term disposal of waste from nuclear power plants -- Kerry said, 'When I'm president of the United States, I'll tell you about Yucca Mountain: Not on my watch.' The realty of the matter, however, is that you can't be 'for' nuclear energy but 'against' Yucca Mountain."

SOME GOOD COMMENTS FROM BRITAIN ON GLOBAL WARMING AND THE IPCC

"Next week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in Vienna. The IPCC is a particularly smug body, with much to be smug about. The Kyoto accord is based on its findings, and since science is not John Prescott's strong suit, he could hardly question whether it made sense for Britain when he signed up to it. Besides, in the Year Zero of 1997, he'd have claimed that New Labour could walk on water by 2012.

Kyoto ranks as the most expensive confidence trick pulled on the world since Yalta in 1945. The IPCC's science is nothing of the kind, being merely a series of "scenarios" of what the weather might be like at the end of the century. Since it's hard enough to predict it for the middle of next week, to say that there are difficulties in long-term projections is putting it mildly.

As Martin Agerup, president of the Danish Academy for Futures Studies, has said: "We simply do not know how much warmer the climate will be in 2100. In fact, the degree of (compound) uncertainty is so large that the mere exercise by the IPCC of providing temperature intervals is highly misleading and provides phoney confidence."*

The evidence that the world is warming is now pretty conclusive, but it's far from clear why, and the consequences are not obvious, either. Kyoto fingered CO2, perhaps because burning all that fossil fuel must surely do something bad, and every schoolboy knows about the greenhouse effect. A warming world will melt the icecaps, and raise sea level, won't it? Well, not so far. Nils-Axel M”rner, head of paleo-geophysics at Stockholm University, has been studying the subject for 35 years. As he puts it: "No one in the world beats me on sea level." He's been to the Maldives, often tipped as the first place to disappear under the waves, and can find no evidence that it's doing so. Satellite altimetry has only been going for 14 years, but it tells the same story.....

Madhav Khandekar has been studying weather patterns for 47 years, mostly for Environment Canada, and his conclusion is that it's the perception that has changed. More people and global television mean that freak events are less likely to escape detection, and do more damage because of the higher value of what's in their path. The weather itself isn't getting any worse.

The central mystery is why our politicians are so blinkered on this subject when, as Ruth Lea argues on the back page of today's paper, the policies we are following are clearly going to make us poorer, with slower growth and lost manufacturing jobs.

Forecasting is always difficult, especially for the future, as the old saw goes, and we love to spook ourselves with projections of doom and disaster. Here's one. The last 600 years have seen a series of mini ice ages, well documented by those who shivered through them. They coincide with periods of low solar activity, and the next one is due in the middle of this century. So perhaps, instead of prostrating ourselves on the altar of global warming, we should be worrying about global cooling.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Now it's oil-changes! "For generations, automobile technicians have advised car and truck drivers to change their engine oil as frequently as every 3,000 miles. The 3,000-mile advice, however, is designed to be precautionary and may not always be necessary. As a result, environmental advocates assert unnecessary amounts of used motor oil are spoiling the environment. In response, American automaker General Motors recently began a campaign to stress the environmental benefits of an automobile maintenance system, which has been available for the past few years, in combating unnecessary discharges of used motor oil into the environment."

"In yesterday's attack in the Senate on the Tasmanian forest industry and all its businesses, workers and representatives, Greens Senator Bob Brown misled Parliament on several points.

Mislead No. 1. Brown claimed that the woodchips exported from Tasmania are "largely" from old-growth forests. This is false - and Senator Brown knows it. Well over half of Tasmania's pulpwood ("woodchips") comes from plantation resources (mostly privately owned), and of the remainder most pulpwood comes from non-old-growth forests. Even the State-owned native forest manager - Forestry Tasmania - says that only 10-20% of its sales for woodchips come from the by-products of the old-growth timber harvest. Note that this is exactly the same 'mislead' that was the basis of the 'green push-polling' scandal that broke in Tasmania two weeks ago.

Mislead No. 2 - Brown claims that Timber Communities Australia is a "front organisation" for the industry. I understand that TCA claims about 70 branches and many thousands of members across Australia - more than the Greens Party! There is no doubt that they are a genuine, large scale grassroots community organisation.

Mislead No. 3 - Brown claims that my organisation (NAFI) and TCA share a "common executive director" - namely, me! I am the Executive Director of the National Association of Forest Industries. Mrs Jill Lewis is the National Director of TCA. Bob Brown knows these facts, which clearly means he has deliberately misled the Senate.

Mislead No. 4 - Brown claims that Timber Communities Australia is the "brainchild" of NAFI. TCA (then called the Forest Protection Society) was established in 1987. NAFI was not established until 1989.

Mislead No. 5 - Brown alleges "bullying" by TCA. Brown cites a story from last year where TCA Tasmania's Barry Chipman complained to the BBC about a one-sided report on Tasmanian forestry. It was Chipman's job to do so. In Britain an independent tribunal upheld much of Chipman's complaints and ordered an apology. This is not "bullying", but the right of ordinary people to seek justice and correction. This story was widely reported in the Hobart Mercury.

Mislead No. 6 - Brown claims that Tasmania's forests are being destroyed at "the greatest rate in history". In fact the harvest in forests of "old-growth" age has fallen to be now just over 1,000 hectares a year. This area of forest is not harvested for pulpwood, but rather for high-quality sawlogs. The harvest area is fully regenerated.

Tasmania has 3.1 million hectares of forest cover (45% of the landmass), 1.2 million of which is at old-growth age. 0.850 million hectares is in reserves. The annual harvest is only 0.001 million hectares. These facts speak for themselves. It is an established fact that Tasmania's forest coverage is actually growing".

*****************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Monday, September 20, 2004

A FUTILE EFFORT TO BUY THE GREENIE VOTE

An Australian conservative Federal government considers spending $450 million for what? To save "old growth" forest from logging -- i.e. forest that has been previously logged and recovered once before. Why it cannot recover again is the mystery. Note that even the Leftist State government says the old growth forest should be logged. (Note also that Australia's major conservative party is called the Liberal party. They really are liberal -- unlike America's so-called "liberals")

"John Howard's senior advisers will spend this weekend considering a new $450million plan to replace Tasmania's controversial old-growth logging with a value-added plantation industry. The proposal, from major softwood company Auspine, would create 900 new jobs, compensating for job losses from ending old-growth logging....

The Auspine plan was strongly endorsed last night by Greens leader Bob Brown, who has held out the prospect of directing preferences to whichever major party commits to ending old-growth logging.....

Mr Jakab, who said he would also be discussing his company's proposals with Labor leader Mark Latham, conceded that the plan required the commonwealth to commit a "very significant" proportion of the $450million. In return, the company would quickly absorb 900 of the 1350 jobs that Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon claims would be lost from phasing out old-growth logging.

Tasmania's Liberal senators are lobbying Mr Howard, who is reported to be planning a visit to the island next week, to stick by the old-growth industry and the regional forest agreement with the state.

Mr Lennon wrote to Mr Howard yesterday demanding he reaffirm his commitment to the RFA - a promise Tasmanian timber groups revealed Liberal senator Eric Abetz had made in writing to them this week.

"Conservatives should think of themselves as people who prefer reason to mysticism, and individuals above tribes -- while honouring the traditions and affections which bind us, of course.

Yet here is Howard spending huge dollars to "save" a "dying" Murray that in fact is now as fresh as it's been in 60 years. Here is Howard backing "green energy" schemes that will in fact do nothing to stop the globe from getting warmer -- if that is indeed what is happening. And now he's reportedly toying with a big-bucks "saving" of Tasmania's forests, of which we have more than you could shake a saw at, as Paul Lennon will tell you....

The rise of green unreason is a great threat to our civilisation, and this is no time for the Liberals to go all mushy".

*****************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Sunday, September 19, 2004

MISREPRESENTING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

"Well, you can't fault The New York Times for trying -- that is, trying to move its global warming agenda forward by any means necessary. On Aug. 26, a routine federal report on climate change research was hailed as 'a striking shift' of the Bush administration, and then used as the basis for a masthead editorial on Aug. 27 calling for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

In reality, the report, 'OUR CHANGING PLANET: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005' resembles a jillion other climate reports with interminable titles emanating from our Washington agencies. University faculty mailboxes groan with this overload... Doesn't anyone, much less the Times, understand how Washington works?"

"With the sudden flood of top-level warnings about imminent environmental doom, one could be forgiven for thinking that new scientific discoveries had been made about the link between global warming and climate change. But nothing much has changed - in terms of the science, that is.

The recent speeches by UK prime minister Tony Blair and Tory leader Michael Howard, describing climate change as one of the greatest threats facing humanity, were driven more by green one-upmanship. Such is the moribund state of politics that the way to attain the moral high ground, without attracting ridicule, is to play the environmentalist trump card.

Talking to business leaders and environmental groups in central London on 14 September, Blair tried to improve his tarnished image as a world statesman by outlining his 'determination' to use the forthcoming chairmanship of both the European Union (EU) and the G8 group of leading industrial nations to 'revitalise international action' on global warming .

Desperate to get in first, Howard announced at a Green Alliance event on 13 September that a future Conservative government would be best placed to take the lead in persuading the rest of the world to 'join the battle against climate change'. Perhaps he had a point, of sorts. After all, former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher did more to reduce UK CO2 emissions than any prime minister since, albeit by default - by pushing through the closure of Britain's coal mines. But, like Blair, Howard had no radical measures up his sleeve, instead highlighting the need to improve household energy efficiency and encourage technologies such as wave and tidal power.

As Simon Jenkins wrote in The Times (London), 'if they really believe in the Apocalypse, only one technology is currently available to hold it at bay and that is nuclear power. All else is hypocrisy'. After all, Blair himself said that 'to acquire global leadership on this issue Britain must demonstrate it first at home'. Improving household efficiency and building a few wind turbines or solar panels is hardly going to make much of a difference in the long term to global CO2 emissions.

But this doesn't matter much, since neither Blair nor Howard set out to drive through radical policy changes. Instead, their speeches were dominated by empty rhetoric and a high dose of eco-moralism.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Saturday, September 18, 2004

RATIONAL GREENIES WOULD TARGET GOVERNMENT BOONDOGGLES FIRST

Peter Samuel points out that socialistic activities of governments (such as farm subsidies) are both a major cause of needless damage to the natural environment and a very poor solution to environmental problems. The article was written 30 years ago but the chronic failure of Greenies to learn anything makes it as relevant as ever. Just some excerpts:

"But the first target of conservationists should be those so-called 'development projects' which are not really development at all, because they are likely to require subsidies to make them go. They should be concentrating their anger on schemes which make neither conservation sense nor economic sense. The elimination of these will both improve the environment and increase people's incomes. There are plenty of uneconomic developments which the conservationists could attack. They did this with great success in the Little Desert affair in Victoria recently. But almost every new rural water-storage project in Australia is uneconomic --because of the paucity of market for the produce of irrigated land. Each of these dams is impoverishing the country by consuming resources in the building which could be used productively elsewhere and by putting into business another collection of farmers who will have to be subsidised steadily over the years ahead. Each dam also impoverishes the environment by submerging vast bush valleys and disrupting the whole ecology of the river downstream. Many of Australia's water birds as well as smaller species of river life are threatened by the changes in river behaviour caused by dams.....

In this context, there is no economic logic in further land clearance for farming or for any more rural dams. There is a positive economic case for progressively taking marginal farms out of agricultural production. 'Let the bush grow back' is a sound slogan for Australia in the 1970s. And it opens new horizons for conservationists. Conservationists can demand an end to policies of agricultural expansion and the beginning of reconstruction, and they should be able to get every taxpayer on side. Every acre of land given back to bush will not only improve the national environment but it will save the nation the costs of surplus agricultural production.

But perhaps the most important advice the economist will give the conservationist is that he should harness the price system to his cause. In other words he should try to extend the economic system based on price incentives into the area of 'the environment' and use it to combat pollution. Use of the price system will generally be more effective and practical than use of direct controls or regulations. Take the example of exhaust emission from cars. Being advised by bureaucrats, governments are in the process of introducing a complicated series of bureaucratic controls. All new cars will have to be fitted, for example, with devices suppressing emission of pollutants below one per cent. This regulation may help somewhat in reducing car-exhaust pollution, but it is an extremely crude device. It means that old cars can go on polluting as before. There is no incentive to the car operator, once he has got his car out of the showroom, to maintain his car so that its pollutant emission is kept down. And there is no incentive to the car manufacturer or fuel supplier to get pollution further below the mandatory ceiling emission set in the regulation. Finally, it is an unfair and wasteful imposition on the country man, who lives in an area of low motor-vehicle density.....

The non-economists' answer to the obvious overuse of cars in cities is to say let them congest: do not build the new roads and parking stations which seem justified by the existing traffic flows and congestion. The better answer is to start pricing the use of roadspace according to the cost that the motorist imposes by occupying that space. If he puts sufficient value on the mobility he gets out of using the roadspace at a particular time to pay the costs to the community of providing that roadspace, then equity and efficiency dictate that he should be able to get that roadspace to use. If motorists were charged the costs of the use of their roadspace, and if parking charges were everywhere related to the rentable value of the space taken up by parking, then the car would be brought under control. There would be an indicator of the social value of new roads, and a better use of existing roads, since charges in peak hours would encourage a de-peaking of traffic flows. Public transport would be able to compete on a more equal basis with the car".

*****************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Friday, September 17, 2004

Hurricanes and Global Warming: Is There a Link?

"Data provided by the National Hurricane Center, shows hurricane strikes (landfalls) by decade in the U.S. since 1900. The 1940s were rather busy, the 70s the quietest, and the 1990s pretty close to the long-term average. A simple linear fit suggests a decrease over time. This is a result echoed by Easterling, et al (2000), who said, "the number of intense and landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has declined." In the Gulf of Mexico there is "no sign of an increase in hurricane frequency or intensity," according to Bove, et al (1998). For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization, "Reliable data . since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased."

Granted, there has been an upswing in the Atlantic since 1995, and this year's bumper crop of storms has struck Florida in numbers and intensities seldom occurring before. A sign of things to come, especially in a warmer world? Not according to Bill Gray's Tropical Forecast group at Colorado State University. Gray, who has developed successful methods for predicting hurricane activity, said, "Various groups and individuals have suggested that the recent large upswing in Atlantic hurricane activity (since 1995) may be in some way related to the effects of increased man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2). There is no reasonable scientific way that such an interpretation of this recent upward shift in Atlantic hurricane activity can be made."

And there is no reason to expect increases in hurricanes due to greenhouse warming. Climate models, for all their problems, are unanimous in at least one respect: they predict that most of the future warming will be in high latitudes, in the polar regions. This will reduce the north-south temperature gradient and make poleward transfer of heat less vigorous -- a task in which tropical storms play a major role. All other things being equal, a warmer world should have fewer, not more, hurricanes."

"The 100 million pound Earth Centre, set up five years ago to promote sustainability, was declared unviable by its operators yesterday. The centre was created on a reclaimed coal mining site in south Yorkshire with the help of œ36 million from the Millennium Commission. A sign outside the gates explains the centre is admitting only people who have booked until Oct 31. Fifty-one of the 75 staff have been made redundant.

The centre, which has charitable status, has been dogged by difficulties since it opened at Denaby Main, near Doncaster. It initially said its target was 500,000 visitors in the first eight months but in the first three months only 30,000 people turned up and 30 of the 140 staff were dismissed. Entrance prices which started at œ8.95 per adult were reduced to œ4.95 for visitors on bicycles, on foot or who had used public transport.

In the 13-week summer season in 2000, there were only 6,000 visitors and the centre was closed to allow a second phase to be completed before re-opening in 2001. After a new chief executive was appointed there appeared to be some success with visitor numbers rising 42 per cent from 10,000 to 37,000 in the first four months of last year. The centre appeared to be on course for 150,000 visitors and the œ2 million turnover required to ensure its future.

Its attractions include an indoor rain forest, gardens, wetlands, country park and play areas along with cycle trains and water features. A statement from the Earth Centre Trust acknowledged the attraction was no longer viable and talks were being held with the Millennium Commission on its future, but its survival hinges on a local authority takeover".

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Thursday, September 16, 2004

TWO REVIEWS OF "ECO-IMPERIALISM" BY PAUL DRIESSEN

Driessen points out how bad for people in poor countries the Green/Left are:

"The time has come to hold these radicals to civilized standards of behavior, end the tolerance for their lethal policies, and demand that they be held accountable for their excesses, and the poverty, disease and death they have perpetrated on the poor and powerless. Eco-Imperialism is an excellent start. Driessen does a masterful job of stripping away the radicals' mantle of virtue, dissecting their bogus claims and holding them to the moral and ethical standards they have long demanded for everyone except themselves. And he does so with humor, outrage and passion - and always without pulling any punches. Every concerned citizen and policy maker should read this book. The environmentalists will hate it. The world's destitute masses will love it. And everyone will be challenged by it to reexamine their beliefs and the environmental establishment's claims."

"There is a shrill claim today by those that fill the streets to protest globalization, and by the organizations that put them there, that these white, relatively affluent groups are speaking on behalf of the world's poor and powerless. This unfortunately, is a message that the Western media have bought uncritically - but not Paul Driessen. He cogently shows how the new Green Eco-Imperialists are seeking to impose their will on developing countries, interfering with their efforts to build dams or grow crops or do any of the things which can lift them out of poverty. These are life-and-death matters for the world's poor, and Driessen is bold and honest enough to challenge the eco-interference in people's lives as immoral and the cause of death and devastation in countries that are trying to develop and transform their lives. Both those who have bought the Green propaganda line and those who have not would benefit from reading Driessen's Eco-Imperialism book."

In the 50s the Left were great advocates of nuclear power. Perhaps the wheel will turn full circle when the Greenies finally admit that it is the only "alternative" energy source that works

"Most of us assume that public policy is based on evidence. Alas, not so.

Why do green campaigners, with the notable exception of James Lovelock, reject nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gases? Because they are frightened of accidents and of radiation emanating from nuclear power stations and nuclear waste. Their fears of radiation are not only widely shared, but they are nourished by official sources and have even become official policy.

Present policies for radiation safety are based on the "linear no-threshold assumption," which is endorsed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. This is the assumption that even the smallest amount of radiation is harmful and may cause cancer and genetic disorders, and that the risk of harm increases proportionately with the dose. On this basis, we should aim to avoid any exposure at all. Accordingly, the standards for radiation protection set by the commission have become more exacting and the maximum exposure dose declared to be safe is continually lowered....

Unfortunately, far from safeguarding our health, current safety standards will almost certainly increase the incidence of cancer. The evidence shows that the effect of radiation on human health is not a linear one, but is a J-shaped curve. Exposure starts by being beneficial at low doses and only becomes harmful at higher doses. This effect is known as hormesis. A low dose of ionising radiation seems to stimulate DNA repair and the immune system, so providing a measure of protection against cancer. The benefit of low doses of radiation in treating cancer have been known for some time and are confirmed by a mass of evidence, particularly from Japan where it has been studied in detail as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Many other examples of the hormesis effect are well known. A bit of sunshine does you good; too much may cause skin cancer. Small doses of aspirin have many beneficial effects; too much will kill you. It also appears to apply to arsenic, cadmium, dioxins and residues of synthetic pesticides, but that is another story.

Epidemiological evidence confirms the hormesis effect of radiation. The prediction that there would be terrible after-effects from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the survivors and their children was proved wrong. Japanese studies of the life expectancy of survivors who suffered relatively low amounts of radiation show that their life expectancy turned out to be higher than those of the control group and no unusual genetic defects have been found in their children. Again, a follow-up study of Japanese fishermen who were contaminated with plutonium after the nuclear tests at Bikini found 25 years later that none of them had died from cancer.....

These facts destroy what are perhaps the strongest objections to nuclear power. They show that the regulations seeking to enforce present, let alone proposed, minimum standards of safety not only cost billions of pounds and have undermined the prospects of our development of nuclear power, but do more harm than good. It is time that we looked more closely at the phenomenon of hormesis and in particular at the successful Japanese experience of using low-dose radiation in the treatment of cancer patients. When the evidence is clear, we should not allow it to be brushed aside by conventional wisdom and ignorance".

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

GREENIES SHAFTING ORDINARY PEOPLE AGAIN

"In Orange County, renting an apartment can cost what a younger person, new to the marketplace, earns a month. So new houses are a dire human necessity. The more built, the lower the cost, including of apartments, since those who move into homes will ease up the demand. This is elementary economics.

Ah, now come certain "biologists"- of the Oregon- and San Diego-based Conservation Biology Institute - who claim that "rare species [and] wildland would be jeopardized" under a developer's plans to increase human homes here. "Significant portions of important breeding and feeding sites for a variety of rare or troubled species could be lost, the biologists say," according to a Register report.

By what standard of "important" do these "biologists," who at their best are but natural scientists and not ethicists or political theorists, determine such matters? Who would be those to whom these sites would be "lost"? One can only lose something if one owns it, and it is only those who own the land that's to be developed who are to lose anything here, not the "biologists," conservationists, ecologists or environmentalists.

Or do we now have a country in which these elites are granted the authority to take whatever they happen to deem "important" from those who actually own it? No objective criteria are provided for determining this supposed "importance." In fact, the environmental extremists, who discount human goals and interests as something unworthy and negligible, have nothing intelligible to offer when asked by what criteria this matter of "importance" is to be decided....

In nature, there will often be rivalry for space and resources, and the "biologists" who chime in so cavalierly about what is lost when human habitats are expanded are engaging not in science but in vested-interest politics and hyperbole - they prefer the wilds as they are, so they want it all preserved, period. And they neglect entirely to consider that this costs human beings millions and millions, not because some greater good is being attained in the process but simply to satisfy arbitrary wishes backed with junk science.

It is also really outrageous that those who defend human habitation in these areas are dismissed as nothing but crass profiteers, as if building homes for people were not every bit as honorable a task as giving them an education, providing for their medical care or helping them to find good vacation spots....

In fact, it is often the environmental extremists who lack the requisite measure of humanity to advise a sensible public policy on these issues".

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

SNOWFALL: ANOTHER THEORY COLLIDES WITH REALITY

Big scare! Pollution is reducing snowfall so the rivers might run dry! Problem: Pollution also increases rainfall. Bigger problem: The historical record does not show any big reduction in meltwater over time. Lesson: Studying just one effect in isolation should be left to the scientists. Drawing big conclusions from just one change is dumb

"Along the western slope of the Rockies, in a laboratory 10,500 feet above sea level, a team of atmospheric researchers has spent the past decade deciphering a deeper meaning from the blizzards that blanket the Steamboat ski resort in its famously pillowy "champagne powder."

They have skimmed snow clouds with screens to size up their icy content. They have zapped falling flakes with lasers to record digital images of the hexagonal shapes. They have captured crystals in a contraption that melts them with a heat gun and measures the mass of the water droplets. And they have come to a provocative conclusion: Air pollution is reducing mountain snowfall, the wellspring of drinking water for Los Angeles, Las Vegas and much of the urban West.

Storm clouds packed with microscopic particles from diesel trucks, coal-burning power plants and cow manure produce far less snow than clouds comparatively free of pollution, the scientists from the University of Nevada's Desert Research Institute have determined.

J. Marshall Shepherd, a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who studies global rain patterns, agreed that Rosenfeld and other scientists are showing that pollution can reduce precipitation in high altitudes.

But other studies, including research by Shepherd on thunderstorms downwind of Houston, suggest that some of the same factors can actually increase the intensity of rain in lower-lying areas, where clouds hold together longer before finally releasing torrential downpours.

Many human activities appear to be altering storm clouds, including the hotter air that emanates from dense urban centers, known as the heat island effect. It will probably take scientists decades to fully understand what is happening, and how water supplies in different parts of the country are being affected, Shepherd said.

"There is certainly convincing evidence that aerosols are having an effect on precipitation," he said, "but there are other factors, including the urban heat island effect, and we are not sure how it all works just yet."

Maurice Roos, California's chief hydrologist, said he is skeptical of the scientists' claims. Roos has reviewed historical records, and concluded that though the snowpack has clearly diminished over the last 40 years, the trend is more likely linked to a slight uptick in temperatures.

If air pollution was causing the serious effects Rosenfeld and others have suggested, the state should be losing far more water, Roos said. "I would not be surprised if there was some influence" from air pollution, said Roos, who has spent 47 years as a state water official. "But we, happily, do not see the major changes in stream runoff that these guys are predicting."

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Monday, September 13, 2004

Ratification without representation: "Congress is currently working on legislation that takes constitutional disregard to a new level. At issue is how to implement future changes to a yet to be ratified treaty -- the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, known as the POPs Treaty. It imposes international bans on 12 chemicals and sets up a process for banning more chemicals in the future."

MORE GUESSWORK MASQUERADING AS SCIENCE

"More than 6000 plants, insects and animals should be added to the list of the world's endangered species, according to a study published yesterday. It found that the number of species threatened with extinction was far more than originally thought because of a "hidden" threat to plants and animals which depend on each other to survive. An international study, published in the journal Science, found that biologists had underestimated the dependent species which died out when a more well-known "host" became extinct. Researchers claimed that at least 200 species may have become extinct without the world realising.

The team, from the universities of Alberta, Singapore and Tennessee, looked at a list of 12,200 plants and animals listed as threatened or endangered. It then studied a diverse selection of insects, mites, fungi and other organisms that are uniquely adapted to these listed plants and animals and which depend on them for survival. Around 6300 species should be classified as "co-endangered", it said.

Dr Heather Proctor, a biologist at the University of Alberta, said:... "What we wanted to learn was, if the host goes extinct, how many other species will go with it. "It would be easy if there were always a one-to-one relationship with a host and its affiliate, however, not all parasites, for example, are restricted to a single host species.

The researchers believed the oversight could have happened because some of the most susceptible organisms were unattractive and unpopular parasites. Dr. Proctor cited a plant vine that became locally extinct in Singapore, taking with it a species of butterfly, parantica aspasia, that depended on the vine for survival. "When we lose this vine, this beautiful butterfly dies off with it, and we'll never see it again except in photographs at museums," she said".

The big weakness is in the second last paragraph above. How can they know that a parasite is not found somewhere else? Proving a negative is notoriously difficult. And the last paragraph above is amusing. Unattractive parasites dying out is bad? A lot of people would manage to hold the tears. And notice how a butterfly that is only locally extinct (i.e. no longer found in one particular location) suddenly seems to become totally extinct

*****************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Cool summer gives global warmers the freeze: "It's been a disappointing summer for global warming alarmists. Hollywood, Mother Nature and the media just haven't cooperated. Even with the unusual situation of two successive hurricanes pounding Florida and another bearing down imminently, global warming hysteria seems to be on ice for now. The summer began with so much promise for the climate control crowd with the release of the global warming disaster movie, 'The Day After Tomorrow.' While the movie made plenty of money, global warming activists wanted much more than that. They hoped the movie would foment global warming hysteria in the same way that 'The China Syndrome' and 'Silkwood' contributed to public sentiment against nuclear power plants. Instead, the movie was so over-the-top with implausible weather phenomena that no one -- not even the usually global warming-sympathetic media -- took it seriously. Then, unlike the movie, the real 'day after tomorrow' turned out to be pretty nice."

GREAT STUFF: COULD BE GOOD FOR FOR OVERTURNING GREENIE NONSENSE

"As the in-house newsletter of the nation's political and bureaucratic establishment, it's not surprising that The Washington Post would run a hit piece on the Data Quality Act late last month.

The act, passed with little fanfare as part of a 2000 appropriations bill, gives the regulated a fighting chance to challenge the quality of the science used by the government in formulating the rules it imposes on the rest of us.

The law not only has the potential to overturn government regulations that are based on immature or slipshod science, but to finally bring some semblance of parity to the endless struggle between the regulators and regulated.

But Washington doesn't like to play fair, or to be challenged on its supposed expertise on everything under the sun. The political process is increasingly driven by a sense of crisis that only sensationalized science can generate. And that makes the act a prime target of the regulate-first, worry-about-the-science-later crowd.

The Post portrayed the law as the "nemesis of regulation" and fretted about its use by "industry" to challenge federal rulemakers on the scientific merits. The story warned ominously that the law, under President Bush, "has become a potent tool for companies seeking to beat back regulation" - though a careful read suggests otherwise. All this could only be viewed as worrisome by those who assume that all government regulations are, ipso facto, beneficial, cost-effective and justified by science.

But we don't share those assumptions. Regulations are routinely handed down from on high based on questionable, immature and incomplete science, thanks to something called "the precautionary principle," which licenses the government to act on the mere suspicion that something might be harmful to human health. Whether these potentially costly actions are scientifically justified is a question frequently put off for another day, and then promptly forgotten, while the regulations live on in perpetuity. And where is it written that individuals, businesses and industries shouldn't be permitted to fight back?

Dr. John Graham, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs inside the Office of Management and Budget, sees the Data Quality Act as a tool for holding regulators to a higher scientific standard. It's helpful not just to industry, he points out, but to a "wide diversity" of individuals and interests that might have reason to challenge the quality of government science.

Among those who have stepped forward to take advantage of the law are the American Chemistry Council, which challenged the science used by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in banning the use of arsenic-treated lumber in playground equipment. Sugar interests and the Salt Institute challenged the validity of federal dietary recommendations aimed at curtailing the public's consumption of these products. And the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers challenged the government's rankings of clothes dryers according to their alleged susceptibility to lint fires. Some of these petitions might seem frivolous and self-serving - unless your own livelihood or the survival of your company are threatened by actions based on dubious science.

Critics of the Bush administration routinely accuse it of "politicizing" science, and they point to the Data Quality Act as a case in point. But the corruption of science for political purposes has been going on for decades. Some of the administration's shrillest critics are most at fault for twisting the data to suit their agendas. And this White House has done more than any in recent history to insist on higher scientific standards before costly and consequential regulations are imposed on Americans".

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

Background

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded in the graph above: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is
maximum 4%.

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here .....